Johnny Showtime: BEN-HUR in 4K

 by JB

I wonder what his pronouns are?

I will admit that 1959’s Oscar wunderkind Ben-Hur was a huge, widescreen hole in my ginormous film knowledge base. Before the release of the new 4K Blu-ray disc, I had never seen it.

(I pause here for Biblical jeering, insults and approbation. ”Insults and Approbation,” by the way, was the name of a band I was in when I was in college.)

I am glad I finally saw it. The new 4K transfer is getting kudos everywhere it is reviewed. It’s a restoration of an old-fashioned, widescreen roadshow epic that you simply must see. Although it’s only March, I feel confident in saying that this will be one of the best discs of the year.

I am on record here as being no fan of 1955’s The Ten Commandments and have poked gentle fun at it several times lo these past fifteen years. I am now convinced that Ben-Hur is the “antidote film” to Commandments in terms of comparable religious epics.

Ben-Hur is everything The Ten Commandments wishes it could be. Ben-Hur is compelling; Commandments is turgid. Ben-Hur contains two of cinema’s greatest action scenes; Commandments is inert. Ben-Hur’s dialogue is natural and concise; Commandments’ dialogue is limp, purple, and silly, even though the finished film lists four screenwriters. Ben-Hur’s performances are vivid and memorable; Commandments’ performances somehow manage to be both cardboard and overwrought. Ben-Hur’s direction is deft; Commandments’ direction is elementary and crude. Ben-Hur’s score, by Miklos Rozsa, is beautiful and compelling; Commandments’ score, by Elmer Bernstein, is uncharacteristically forgettable.

I could go on and on. In one of the few examples of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences getting something right, The Ten Commandments won one measly Oscar, Best Special Effects. (Around the World in 80 Days won Best Picture that year.) Ben-Hur went home with eleven, a record at that time: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Film Editing, Best Special Effects, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design. It only lost in a single category in which it was nominated, Best Adapted Screenplay. This is a record matched only by Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

THE PLOT IN BRIEF. REMEMBER, THE FILM IS FOUR HOURS LONG: Messala (Stephen Boyd) returns to Jerusalem, the city of his childhood, because he has been made Roman Commander of the Fortress Antonia there. He is reunited with his childhood friend, Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) a rich Jewish prince and merchant. Messala wants Judah to rat out local Jews who oppose Roman rule; Judah refuses.

An accident involving loose roofing tiles gives Messala the excuse to have Judah and his mother and sister thrown in jail. Judah is sentenced to row in the galley of a warship—a death sentence. While being transported to the ship, Judah drops from exhaustion and thirst, but a local carpenter offers him water. This “local carpenter” may or may not become important later in the story.

Judah excels at rowing and actually manages to stay alive during an epic and arduous battle at sea. He saves the life of Roman Consul Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins). Returning to Rome, Arrius petitions Emperor Tiberius to free Judah, then adopts Judah as his son. Judah becomes a master charioteer, largely by befriending the horses and treating them well.

Judah seizes on an opportunity to compete in a chariot race against Messala and extract his revenge. The chariot race is brutal, even by brutal Roman chariot race standards, made even more so because Messala, for some strange reason, is allowed to have chariot wheels with sharp, spinning spikes sticking out of them. MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT: Judah wins the race. Messala falls from his chariot, is trampled by horses, and breaks every bone in his body. Judah searches for his mother and sister. He does not like what he finds.

The chariot race is rightly the most famous scene in the picture. It took five weeks to shoot and cost over a million dollars. Stars Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd actually learned how to drive chariots, and the fact that it’s really them in most shots helps to sell the scene’s realism. Seven thousand extras were hired to play the crowd in the stands. Seventy-eight horses were trained to pull the chariots. The sequence was directed by Andrew Marton and legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, filmmakers who often acted as second-unit directors on other director's films. The ratio of footage shot to footage used in the sequence was 263 to 1, one of the highest ratios ever for a Hollywood film. Sergio Leone was one of the assistant directors in the sequence’s second unit crew. The finished sequence is sixteen minutes of pure cinema.

I was blown away by the quality of the image here; it’s one of the best 4K Blu-ray discs I have ever seen. Focus is razor sharp; colors are vivid and eye-popping; the level of fine detail is reference quality; and the soundtrack is clear, booming where it needs to be, and pleasing to the ear. I felt that viewing this disc on my massive flat screen TV was the closest I was ever going to get to an authentic 1950s roadshow experience, unless someone decides to buy the Cinerama Dome and reopen it.

Please buy the Cinerama Dome and reopen it.